The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
There exists now an overwhelming amount of data of various types being produced, exchanged, and stored. This has resulted from the computing power and connectivity bandwidth now available together with the relatively inexpensive storage costs for the data. Consequently, the ability to search through the data and find relevant information is emerging as a key application as more and more data is being saved.
However not all data can be accessed easily. Although text data can be indexed and thus searched relatively easily, speech data, being commonly untranscribed, is not in a form readily searchable. Manually transcribing speech is expensive both in time and computing resources, and also raises privacy concerns. Nevertheless, as storage becomes yet ever cheaper, more and more useful, untranscribed speech data will be stored, thereby increasing the demand or need to search through this data.